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Image replacement can be a contentious issue when it comes to optimizing your websites for a search engine, but is widely supported by leading-edge web standards developers attempting to create more visually appealing websites for their users whilst still retaining semantic, accessible code.

Negative indenting (-9999px) is the same thing when it comes to Google interpretation of cloaking or hiding text.

Screen readers will not read any content hidden by display:none, so it's not a good alternative when discussing accessibility. Text-indent: -9999px is OK and is rendered by screen readers.

I also believe that Google might potentially flag display:none as your typical cloaking behaviour, where the negative indenting method might be a bit new for them (although, I am sure they know about it) July 17, 2007

I usually see the titles of an article like this and get ready for a bit of a battle in the comments section, but you have thought this out and presented both sides of the issue very articulately.

My advice in this 'validation' argument now is to forget what Google and search engines think about validation or semantic markup.

You will always get varied answers, mostly on the side that they don't care about markup to that detail... then Google turn around and are using Microformatted content in their Google Maps application.

Google will not set the pace forever. We decide what is important and what we want to search for... Social media, microformats search, accessibility as SEO (gaining more users by access) and alternate methods will soon be what we are focussing on.

Those who follow web standards ideologies will be way ahead of the game.

character encoding is another way to hide your mailto: address and is a lot cleaner than the javascript solutions.
eg. name@email.com would be:
name@email.com (check source code of this email)
has worked for me, just google 'character encode email address' for some simple translators. December 19, 2006